From top: The Dying With Dignity Bill 2020 Irish Palliative Medicine Consultants’ Association (IPMCA)
Tomorrow
The Dying with Dignity Bill 2020, which proposes making provision for ‘assistance in achieving a dignified and peaceful end of life to qualifying persons’, will be voted on in the Dáil.
The Private Members’ Bill, tabled by Gino Kenny, sponsored by Bríd Smith, Paul Murphy; Mick Barry and Richard Boyd Barrett, is being considered by Sinn Fein, The Green Party and supported by the Labour Party. The bill can be read in full here.
It is expected that the government will table an amendment to the bill that would hold it up for a year and require a special Oireachtas committee to examine the issue of assisted dying.
This morning, 17 members of the Irish Palliative Medicine Consultants’ Association (IPMCA) expressed their objection in a letter to The Irish Times:
As individuals and members of the Irish Palliative Medicine Consultants’ Association (IPMCA), we are gravely concerned by any proposal to legislate for assisted suicide and euthanasia in Ireland.
Based on our collective experience over many decades of providing specialist care to thousands of individuals in Ireland and their families each year, we have closely observed the experiences of people who have lived and are living with serious illness.
The threats of the proposed Bill to healthcare in Ireland, to the true meaning of the doctor-patient relationship and to the future of what we know compassionate and supportive specialist palliative care to be are many.
We worry about the impact on people who already struggle to have their voices heard in our society – older adults, the disabled, those with mental illness and others. We worry that the most vulnerable are those who may be made to feel a burden to their families and come under pressure to end their lives prematurely.
Our experiences tell us that many in our society don’t really know what dying is like, or how rare it is that severe pain cannot be controlled. Most people do not see that within the easing of physical, psychological or spiritual distress and addressing people’s fears, hopes, sadness and loss, the goal of palliative care remains to enhance the living of each life which often transforms the experiences of living, dying and bereavement for individual patients and their families.
We are convinced that as dying with dignity is already present within healthcare in Ireland, no change to our current laws is required.
Palliative medicine and dying with dignity (Irish Times Letters)
We can get the Right to Die legislation discussed in the Dail but the Assisted Human Reproduction Legislation is still sitting on the bench FFS. 2020!
I’d support legislation for assisted dying.
I’m not sure this proposed legislation is 100% but it seems to be sound with various checks and balances.
You can try it first then, and let us know how it went.
What a horrible thing to say to a person
I support very limited assisted dying but this bill needs tightening up. While the Iona “Institute” aka David Quinn (who is recently now also an epidemiologist) and his shill Angela Bottom are railing about death culture and blaming this initiative on abortion, I would rather a citizen’s assembly style discussion forum. This is serious legislation and it mandates serious consideration and water-tight drafting. This bill is not it.
‘17 card carrying members of a secret Roman Catholic sect/cult object’.. usual Opus Die crowd. That said, fully agree a citizen’s forum is the way to go with this. Anyone who has nursed a relative through death knows we need change here and I think the vast majority of people know that and know how to make the right choices when the time comes. Little step by step we are growing up as a nation and society.
17 doctors ar emembers of Opus Dei because they disagree with you on end of life issues? Perhaps you should be like the nation, and grow up.
Wouldn’t bite you if it wasn’t true.. !! The RC religious are just wrong on all the big important life decisions facing us as a society. I’m sorry for you, locked in a brainwashed state of mind, but that’s where you and all your religious fellow travellers reside.
OK. It’d be best if we could leave religion out of this debate, but suit yourself.
I agree completely. It’s the brainwashed religious that cause all of the problems. Unable to see what’s happening in front of their own eyes because their brains are so full of horse manure about what they should do and think instead of having the courage to take on the responsibility of working it out for themselves.
@Cù Chulainn
Modern scientific practices have proven so much better.
Need I give a better example as right now!
What Iona don’t seem to get is that they have the worst habit of popularizing that which they seek to prevent.
Time and time again, using scaremongering and religious extremist arguments just drives people to the other side. Counterproductive lowest common denominator points that insult people’s intelligence. I’ll gladly consider what palliative care doctors have to say but not a handful of hardliners with unparalleled access to the media all the while whinging about being silenced.
Its very dismissive (and surely uninformed…or underinformed) of you to declare that these 17 people are in any way “hardliners”.
What are you basing that on.
I recognise some of those names and institutions. They’ve cared for 100s of thousands of people at the end of their lives. Perhaps they have a point of view worth considering.
Have reread your point and think I misunderstood who you were calling hardliners. Sorry MME.
Excellent that this is even being discussed.
Would love to see the right to die with dignity come in as soon as possible,
+1
Honestly never thought I’d see it in my lifetime.
Proponents should address the undeniable broadening of the scope of this type of legislation in different jurisdictions, for example The Netherlands, to include non terminally ill people and people who cannot give informed consent (including children).
that sounds like scare mongering News,
I disagree that reality is scare mongering.
It’s true.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people in this country who are forced to take brain altering chemicals/medicines at the behest of a single consultant psychiatrist, supporting by a rubber-stamping oversight board.
They have no recourse. None.
The forgotten and easily sectioned.
Please, just inject me now.
Not waiting around for this deadly virus to get me.
The Kate O’Connell thread is earlier in the feed…
Full to the brim of my bowler hat with that – well fed.
great. now do living with dignity.
…at the end of the day the church exercise almost total control over education and health…ask anyone who works, or aspires to work in that area…
As someone with close experience of dementia I can only hope this is passed.
I don’t think dementia is a terminal illness as defined in the Bill. Also, I dont think there’s any way that consent could be ascertained…as required under the Bill. But, of course, I could be wrong on both counts.
In my own life I’ve recently experienced the loss of a close loved-one due to cancer. I can only say that I don’t believe that the option of assisted suicide would not have meant less distress for that person.
The definition is:
For the purposes of this Act, a person is terminally ill if that person—
(a) has been diagnosed by a registered medical practitioner as having an incurable
and progressive illness which cannot be reversed by treatment, and the person is
likely to die as a result of that illness or complications relating thereto (“a
terminal illness”), and
(b) treatment which only relieves the symptoms of an inevitably progressive
condition temporarily is not to be regarded for the purposes of paragraph (a) as
treatment which can reverse that condition
Dementia would certainly be argued here.
The issue with dementia is capacity of mind. The criteria are that a person:
(a) is terminally ill,
(b) has the capacity to make the decision to end his or her own life, and
(c) has a clear and settled intention to end his or her own life which has been reached
voluntarily, on an informed basis and without coercion or duress.
If you get an early diagnosis of dementia, for example, then ok but the problem is that it creeps up and, it has such a stigma that people try to hide it. And, unfortunately, victims are becoming younger and younger. The concept of Living Wills is one that is important for diseases like Dementia – a process where you can make a will stating that, if something should happen to me and I’m not able to decide for myself then I want this to happen. The issue with these is that some godbothering relative will always argue that you could have changed your mind
Problem is with Dementia – you literally do lose your mind and every other function too. And. quite apart from anything else, if you have ever seen someone with advance dementia the one thing that they absolutely do NOT have any of is dignity.
I mean no disrespect, but in some ways it is relevant.
I just heard that Eddie Van Halen has passed away. He suffered with cancer for several years. He is a great loss to the world, to the memories of my youth, and most importantly to his family. My sincere condolences to them.
My own brother passed away from cancer too. I am not sure if Eddie suffered, but I think he and my brother may have wanted the choice of when to go.
I for one am hoping this gets passed.
Instead of living in the house of pain, perhaps it can be somebody get me a doctor so I can jump unchained and dance the night away.
+ 1